Islands and their potential
From time to time, the Doctoral School of the Hungarian University of Fine Arts, due to the self-evident exchange of generations of students, aims to make visible individual artistic research and related practices in a typically self-organizing way, but not for the obvious reason of articulating the latter as an undertaken community. Such group exhibitions have been, without claiming to be exhaustive, some of the most recent: exhibitions linked to a commemorative year (DLADLA 100, Barcsay Hall, or the Optimist exhibition in the same venue, which dealt with the institutional memory of Miklós Erdély), presentations linked to examination sites (The waters turn, Nest Art Club, The direction of the run, Feszty House) or occasions that emerged from a dialogue between a theme leader and theme leaders (Exploration, Studio Gallery). In the year 2022, the current community of the Doctoral School has launched a series of exhibitions, entitled Things Done by Telling, as a student initiative, which, after a commercial gallery, an independent non-profit gallery and a municipal exhibition space, will now be presented in the aqb Project Space as the fourth stage, providing the widest possible immersion in the creative work of doctoral students and postgraduates.
Opening hours
Wednesday - Saturday15:00 - 18:00
Schedule
Islands and their possibilities aims to respond to this inclusive situation through the exhibition system and the series of events that will accompany the exhibition. In essence, I am exploring whether it is possible, with nearly two dozen participants, to organise in a way that reinforces each other's visibility - bypassing the enumerative nature of the mass spectacle and the compulsively egalitarian modes of operation of conformity - to position another member of my adopted community while also asserting my own authentic thematic, expressive or artistic vision.
Taking advantage of the building history of aqb Project Space, each block of the space is structured with a robust wooden framework and is designed around a practice borrowed from the field of education. We conceive of each group of artifacts as autonomous islands to be explored in the organization of the individual artifacts. Staying with the geographic topos, we thus draw out in the exhibition archipelagos that are isolated along the lines of creative practices and can be understood in their context, validating a fourfold system of criteria, placing the works in relation to time and in a coordinate system of self-reflection and social reaction.
→ → The first such group is the utopian, futuristic creative gaze, which is primarily a critique, a vision, a vision of changes articulated by the social, technological or economic processes of a narrower or wider community.
← ← Next is the range of works that work on the exploration of the past, whether it is an exploration of private or collective memory, a gathering of inspiration, a bringing into play of cultural references from the past.
→ ← The third group is a series of installations and performative works that focus on subjective experience, introspection and looking inwards. Including those works that focus primarily on the study of the possibilities of the chosen artistic medium, a method of meaning-making narrated through visual means.
← → Finally, works that seek and form relations in an outward-looking, social context complete the above four divisions.
Artistic preferences and works placed within this coordinate system can bring us closer to navigating and drawing parallels within the community of the Doctoral School, and the exhibition and the realisation of the January event series can have a community cohesive power. On the other hand, they capture a small snapshot of the distribution of creative practices that exist at the intersection of domestic artistic production and academic research.
The exhibition will be opened by the MKE LAB working group, Mátyás Fusz, Gabriella Kiss and Szabolcs KissPál.
